


Medical Advice

by ValmureEld (InkSiren)



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: CPR, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Jim has to play doctor, Leonard "Bones" McCoy Whump, Medic in trouble, Team as Family, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-07-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:01:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25272832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InkSiren/pseuds/ValmureEld
Summary: Jim and Leonard are stranded. That always goes well, doesn't it? At least Leonard knows how to treat just about anything.Too bad this time Leonard is also the one in danger.AKAI really wanted the medic to have to explain how to save himself. Rated only for bad language.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 95





	Medical Advice

**Author's Note:**

> Listen there's not nearly enough McCoy whump.

“I hate this.”

“I know, Bones.”

Water dripped from the cave ceiling, echoing uncomfortably off the rock for a long stretch that shouldn’t have counted as silence, but it did.

“I hate you.”

“I know you do, Bones.”

James Kirk rubbed his forehead and squinted, blinking up at the sliver of moonlight bleeding through one of the several spiderwebbed cracks in their ceiling. The good news was that the cracks were an illusion--really it was veins of crystal letting the light in. That was good because above them was an ocean.

The bad news was they were trapped in a pocket under an alien ocean and had no tech to contact the Enterprise. That meant waiting for Spock to come find them.

“I hate this planet, too.” There was a wet smack as Leonard McCoy flung some kind of squid creature off of his hand and then shoved it with his foot, a look of disgust on his face as it squelched away.

“Do you have to be mean to the locals?” Kirk asked, scrubbing a hand through his hair and then dropping to sit on one of the many mossy rocks. At least there was light in the cave: they’d swum through several species of bioluminescent jellyfish and some of the crystal gave off a faint glow as well.

He frowned. So maybe they were deeper than he’d thought and that wasn’t moonlight after all….

“The locals put a hole in my skin, I’m not feeling very welcomed,” Bones snapped, gesturing with a bloody hand where three small puncture wounds were already starting to clot up.

“I’ve looked worse after you’ve attacked me with a hypo, stop being a baby,” Kirk said, pulling his one pack off of his back. They’d planned on swimming so he had supplies in a waterproof bag, which was the good thing. They hadn’t planned on camping so it was time to assess what they had and figure out if making a break for it or staying put was a better chance for survival. Considering there was an entire alien ocean out there and they’d been chased into their present situation but an enormous crustacean (Bones was swearing up and down he was going to eat nothing but lobster on next leave), it was probably better to stay put.

“You look worse now,” Leonard retorted, gesturing to the blood seeping across the rock near Kirk’s foot.

Jim glanced down, clucking his tongue. “Man. Looks like one got me too. I didn’t even notice it doesn’t hurt, Bones.”

“Speak for yourself, maybe you’re used to being chewed on in the field but my wrist is starting to burn.”

He rubbed at the injury, working his sleeve up and stepping closer to Jim where there was better light. Jim’s brow furrowed.

“Bones, I don’t think your veins are supposed to look like that.”

“Why did I ever go to medical school when we have you?” he muttered, though there was less bite than Jim was used to.

“What do we do, Bones can we...I don’t know suck the poison out?”

“Yes Jim, that urban legend about sucking poison from a wound when it directly punctures a system that pumps six quarts a minute is exactly what we should be listening to right now.”

Jim raised both hands. “Sorry I care, Bones. Sorry I care.”

“Why do you automatically assume it’s poison?” the doctor added, pulling his sleeve back down and grabbing at Jim’s leg. “Let’s see your leg.”

“I don’t know, maybe because your veins are turning black and you described burning? Why are you worried about my leg right now that six quarts a minute thing could already be at your heart!”

“Yeah it probably is but maybe we can amputate your ankle before my heart stops and then I don’t have to listen to you bitch and moan until Spock gets here. Now shut up and quit fighting me,” Bones growled, tugging Jim’s boot off.

Jim watched him with an incredulous look as Bones peeled away wet sock and turned his ankle, examining the same three punctures that had already stopped bleeding and didn’t do more than smart. Unlike Leonard’s skin, Jim’s was its normal pale self, and the only color in his veins was the blue he was used to seeing.

“Maybe the one that bit me wasn’t venomous?” Jim suggested, foot twitching as Leonard placed two fingers across the top of it, then at his ankle. “What in the world are you doing?”

“Feeling for swelling, warmth, and believe it or not, a pulse, captain.”

“In my foot?”

Bones shot him a scathing look. “Yes, Jim. Your foot gets a blood supply of its own. Be nice if your brain started using its share since my life probably now depends on it.”

“I know my foot needs blood I just didn’t know you could find a pulse there,” Jim snapped back. He blinked as Leonard stood up and caught himself on the wall like he’d almost fallen with the quick change in posture.

“Bones…?” he asked, standing too. “Hey,” he said, his adrenaline surging as he reached out to steady his friend. “Talk to me, what do we do?”

“Well,” Leonard said, voice upsettingly level and calm all of the sudden. “Feels like my heart has already started to slow down but I’m still getting oxygen no problem so if it’s a paralytic it may not affect my diaphragm right away. Which is unfortunate since a cardiac suppressant is much harder to deal with when we have nothing to work with.”

“It what?!”

“Jim, I really need you to not panic right now because if I pass out you’re the only one here to stop me from just giving up the ghost and I’m too damn young for that. I don’t want to die because I got bit by a squid a billion lightyears away from my daughter.”

Fear stood as an icy glint in Leonard’s eyes and Jim met them, his own fear settling in his gut as he compartmentalized and swallowed, squeezing the doctor’s shoulders. “I’m not letting you die, just tell me what to do.”

“Let’s start with making my body’s job a little easier,” Leonard muttered, sitting heavily down in what Jim didn’t want to admit was more a controlled collapse. Part of him wanted to check on the bite wound again, but a glimpse of greying veins in Leonard’s neck told him everything he needed to know.

Bones leaned against a mossy rock, and Jim could see him calculating as his chest worked steadily, continuing to rise and fall with deep breaths. He was oddly calm, and he hoped that was the result of survival priorities in his brain and not shock.

Could a medic go into trauma triage mode on himself?

Jim was thinking Leonard might have to because aside from listening for breath and a heartbeat and knowing how to stop bleeding, Jim’s medical training was garbage without any kind of equipment.

“We can’t make any kind of antidote and preventing the spread of the poison is way too late so really all you have to do is keep my heart beating and oxygen in my system until Spock can find us,” he began, pressing fingers to his own throat and glancing at his watch as he did so. Jim knelt next to him, feeling slightly hysterical.

“Oh is that all?”

“Well if you do find one of those squid things maybe try to capture it so we can synthesize an antidote on the ship but only if one of the little bastards comes back and you don’t have to leave me to do it. If I pass out and stop breathing you’ll have six minutes maximum before my brain will start to die, and I know you can’t relate but I use my brain, Jim, and I need it to keep working.”

Six minutes. Six minutes was nothing.

“So you stop breathing I--”

“Breath for me. Straighten my head out so my windpipe is clear and pinch my nose shut and then pretend I’m that pretty Orion and breathe until you can see my chest rise.”

“Hold on, Bones are you walking me through CPR?” Jim asked, incredulous. “I thought the academy quit teaching it because it was too barbaric and outdated. I used to hear it thrown around as a joke.”

“Normally it is but do you see a scanner or a hypo or a micro ventilator in this cave? Why do you know about CPR anyway, you didn’t pay attention to your own training.”

“Bones I could kill you with this!”

“Now there’s the joke. CPR is from the dark ages but it will still keep my brain alive longer than doing nothing so will you shut up and focus?” Bones snapped, gesturing in his irritation as he glanced at his watch. “My pulse is still strong and regular for now but it’s slowing down and I promise you I’m not feeling relaxed enough for that to be natural.”

“So I can breathe for you but what do I do if your heart stops?” Jim asked, his voice sounding hollow to his own ears.

“Compressions. Lay me out flat, lace your hands over top of each other like this,” he said, demonstrating. “Put the heel of your hand against my heart and push. Hard. Please at least tell me you know where the human heart actually is. Point at your left shoulder and I’ll shoot you.”

Jim grimaced, settling his hand in the middle of his own chest where he could feel his heart trying to escape him. “Pretty sure it’s here.”

“Pretty sure I’m going to die,” Bones sighed.

“Wait is that not right?”

“It’s right you just have to be more than ‘pretty sure’, Jim!”

“That’s why I’m asking! I’m not a medic, Bones!”

“Yeah don’t remind me. Yes, the bulk of the heart is protected by the sternum. Give me your hand.”

Jim did, and Bones placed it on his own chest. “There. That’s where you’re going to have to be, and when I say hard I mean it. Six litres a minute, that’s a ridiculous amount of pressure you’re going to have to make up for.”

“Can’t I--I don’t know...pop your heart or something?” Jim asked, feeling queasy. Suddenly the feeling of Leonard’s heart beating into his palm wasn’t pleasant at all--it just reinforced how possible it was that it could stop.

“It isn’t a balloon, Jim! It’s an incredibly developed muscle that sustains a high pressure environment for upwards of a hundred years. You’ll be lucky if you can keep up with real compressions for more than a minute.”

“You’re not making this better.”

“No but it’s giving me an adrenaline rush to think about how I’m stuck depending on you so that might give me more time conscious.”

Jim rubbed at his eyes. “You’re burning a lot of energy being sarcastic. Can you at least tell me that the horror stories about broken ribs are also a myth?”

Bones grimaced, shaking his head. “No, that part means you’re pressing hard enough.”

Jim swore and Leonard’s expression flickered, throat tensing as he swallowed and closed his eyes. Jim’s hand shot out in panic, squeezing the medic’s shoulder.

“Hey, Leonard?”

“Don’t start using my name like that,” Bones snapped. “You’re going to make me emotional.”

“Okay, Bones what’s going on, what changed?”

“Well,” he panted, and the movement of his chest looked like it was taking a lot more work. “That burning has gotten worse and now it’s getting harder to think.”

Jim’s fingers went to Leonard’s jaw then, and the medic’s eyes cracked open. There was a rawness there that Jim wasn’t used to seeing and it scared him.

“If I lose a pulse,” he said, breath rasping as he drew another. “Start compressions. Even if you can find some kind of heartbeat.”

“You want me to do CPR before you’re dead?” Jim asked, horrified at the concept, but Leonard’s head lolled back and he didn’t respond. If Jim hadn’t been actively monitoring the doctor’s pulse when it happened it would have terrified him much more.

As it was, the sluggish pulse and the increased heaviness of his breathing was bad enough.

“Come on Spock,” Jim muttered, glancing up at the crystal above them, his free hand going to cover Bones’ heart. “Come on.”

For a long time, there was little change, and Jim was painfully on edge. Under one hand he could still feel the pulse thrumming in Leonard’s throat, under the other he could feel the slow reverberation of his heart, the labored rise and fall of his chest.

He was alive. Just barely, and the water lapping the edge of their sanctuary became an irritating secondary pulse.

Then, just as he was hoping it wouldn’t come to this, it became the only pulse.

Jim was moving before his brain had a chance to register, no never mind accept what was happening.

“Okay I can do this, okay,” he muttered, pulling Leonard away from the rock and cradling his head as he quickly lowered him down. The dead weight sparked a new rush of adrenaline and Jim was shaking as he bent to breathe for his CMO.

“You know, it’s really hard to picture that Orion when you taste like whiskey,” he said, the decision to talk not entirely his own as he moved to Leonard’s chest and felt the wrongness of heat without movement.

“Did you drink right before we beamed down? Or was that tricorder actually a flask?” he huffed the questions out as he pressed, feeling the disconcerting burn in his muscles after only one round. “That might explain why you were slow enough to get bit by a squid. Maybe they’re attracted to whiskey.”

He moved back for breaths, straining his eyes to make sure the air was actually going in. It was wrong. His chest rose, and it was all wrong. More compressions, more useless questions. Maybe the same ones. Jim’s sense of awareness was withdrawn, tunneled inside while he tried not to question what he was doing or how it would end.

“Hollow tricorder, that...necklace that you stored the illegal rye in. Come on Bones, you gotta tell me where you keep finding this stuff,” he pleaded, reaching fingers to the notch of Leonard’s throat.

There was nothing, tears were brimming and his nose was burning, and when he bent to breathe again one of those tears struck down Leonard’s cheekbone.

Another set of compressions, the sickening cave of a rib breaking. Jim felt his stomach lurch and he pointedly swallowed several times and sucked in a shaky breath before giving it to Bones.

“Sorry, Bones I’m so…” he gasped, fingers trembling as he settled his hands, steeling himself to break another rib if he had to. He’d apologize later, preferably while Leonard was high on pain medication. “Sorry.”

Still no pulse.

“I’ll never ask you to leave the ship again. Next shore leave, I won’t ask you to come back to the ship either just, please don’t make me tell your daughter I lost you to a squid.”

Lactic acid was quickly overriding Jim’s adrenaline and he was breathing hard, his own heart beating enough for both of them.

“Dammit Bones, you don’t get to give up like this!” he found himself shouting, desperation turning to an irrational anger. The next time he settled his hands his muscles faltered, and he stumbled over Leonard’s chest, a sob breaking in. His fingers twisted in Leonard’s shirt, the anger intensifying at his own failure.

He tried again, and his muscles gave way. Again. One good compression.

Two.

It was all he had.

There was a flicker beneath his palm, and his head shot up, eyes wide.

“Bones?”

He pressed his hand flatter, desperately feeling for anything. Anything.

 _Nothing_.

He slipped his hand beneath the shirt instead, trying again, the lump in his throat making it hard to breathe.

Another flicker and he heard the barest sip as Bones took something of a breath on his own.

“Fuck, Bones,” Jim breathed, his vision blacking for the merest moment as he collapsed over his friend.

“Don’t ever do that again, I hate being the doctor,” he said, cupping Leonard’s cheek and searching for signs of consciousness. There was nothing, but when Jim pressed fingers to his throat a distant pulse brushed them.

“Please don’t stop,” he whispered, looking around the cave and just realizing again how powerless he was to get them out. “Please just….keep beating.”

Was he talking to Leonard’s organs?

Kirk blinked and slumped next to Leonard’s supine body, exhaustion hitting him all at once. He didn’t dare sleep, didn’t dare think about how he simply didn’t have the reserves to try again if Leonard’s heart failed him, so he did the only thing he could and he shifted to lay his ear against Leonard’s chest, avoiding the side he’d felt crack.

Warmth pillowed the side of his head and he felt a fresh wave of tears as Leonard’s heartbeat came over his senses.

“It’s kinda stupid,” he muttered, hugging himself and shuffling wet, sandy grit into his pants as he settled a little closer. “But I realize this is the first time I’ve heard your heart beat, Bones. You’ve been mother henning mine but...I think everyone forgets about yours.”

Kirk himself certainly did. It was easy to think of the CMO as invincible, ironically. The doctor couldn’t get hurt. The doctor couldn’t die.

Because then who would save him?

“I wish M’Benga was here,” Kirk muttered, sniffing and scrubbing some of the tears away. “You have enough things to bitch at me about without the ribs on top of it all.”

“I wish M’Benga was here too, then I’d be napping in his office instead of listening to you complain.”

The voice was reed-thin and horribly strained, but Kirk’s head popped off Leonard’s chest so fast his vision greyed again.

“Bones!” he gasped.

There was nothing more than a weak groan and a crumpled expression as Leonard’s hand came up to touch the rib Jim had damaged.

“I take it…” he drew a slightly deeper breath with a worse grimace “my heart took a time out.”

“Caught it napping,” Jim agreed, sniffing through a watery smile. “I got it back to work, don’t worry.”

“CPR doesn’t actually work like that but...I’ll let you...think that,” Bones grit, patting clumsily at Jim’s sleeve. “Venom must be...fading.”

“That fast?”

“Gift horse, Jim,” Bones said through his teeth. “Gift horse.”

There was silence for a while, Jim watching every grimace and shaky breath with an overwhelming sense of gratitude. “Bones?”

“Mmm?”

“How...how much did you hear?”

He cracked open an eye with an incredulous scowl. “Really, Jim? What did you do, confess your love?”

Jim chuckled, drawing his knees up and propping his forearms on them and shaking his head. “Never mind just….seeing if I had to keep my promise.”

Leonard’s head shifted and he heard a shuffle. “What did you promise. Huh? Jim! What did you promise?”

“Nope.”

“ _Jim_.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

He glanced over to see that scowl still firmly in place and he’d never seen a more reassuring expression in his life. Gold particles started to swirl in place around them both and Jim’s eyebrows went up.

“Hey! Spock found us!”

“You’re not getting out of--”


End file.
